King of the North Wind

One of the supporting players in The Hooded Men is Sir James Chandos, an outlaw knight who calls himself the King of the North Wind or the Green Knight. James has made a base for himself in the ruined castle of Tickhill in West Yorkshire, from where he and his men ride out to plunder the surrounding countryside. His nicknames are meant to overawe the peasantry, duped into believing that Chandos is no man at all, but an avenging spirit of the greenwood.

James is based on a mixture of fact and legend. The Chandos family were real enough, and held lands in Herefordshire and Derbyshire. In the late thirteenth century a Sir John Chandos was pardoned by Edward I for holding Chartley Castle, in Staffordshire, against a royal army led by the king’s brother, Prince Edmund. This John was a knight of Derbyshire and as such a follower of the Earl of Derby, Robert de Ferrers, who was in revolt against the crown. I took part of the inspiration for James from John’s real-life rebellion.

The image of the Green Knight is taken from Gawaine and the Green Knight, a popular medieval tale set in the days of King Arthur. In the story Sir Gawaine, a knight of the Round Table, is forced to play ‘the beheading game’ with the mysterious knight, itself based on much older folklore motifs. Gawaine eventually tracks down his enemy at the Green Chapel, a lair inside the forest, where his life is spared as a reward for his honesty.

The King of the North Wind was another real-life outlaw, though we don’t know much about him. In 1336 a man calling himself ‘Lionel, King of the Rout Raveners’ wrote a threatening letter to the parson of Huntington, Yorkshire, addressed thus:

“Given at our Castle of the North Wind, in the Green Tower, in the first year of our reign.”

It seems Lionel saw himself as a forest lord or king, ruling from his greenwood palace of the Green Tower.